The Early Novel in Ireland: from Poetry to Prose

Tracing the development of the novel in Irish writing and culture from the 17th century to the contemporary moment, these talks will consider how Irish writers have mastered the novel form, making it a means by which the Irish story is told both at home and abroad. The novel tells the story of individuals, but also tells the national and communal story. Irish novels have articulated stories of famine and loss, of emigration and the move from tradition into modernity. Irish culture celebrates the storyteller and the art of storytelling. One element of the appeal of the Irish novel is the underlying struggle all Irish writers have with the act of storytelling itself, which in many ways becomes the story being told. Reasons for that struggle are varied, but a key factor is that Irish writers have always had an uneasy relationship with the English language because of a move away from, or abandonment of, the Gaelic language. James Joyce famously has a character declare that the English language “so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of [that] language.” Words are important, language is power, and the struggle for the Irish writer is to use this tool to tell stories for both local and global audiences. So how stories are told is essential, but so too is where they are told. In Ireland, place and landscape are important, and literature has been one of the sites where this relationship between people and place has played out. Stories have recreated Ireland as a rural space on the margins of Western Europe, and have subverted that often stereotypical representation, offering narratives centred on urban spaces. But importantly, stories attach themselves to places, making them both imagined and real at once. These talks will consider links between place and language, between the struggle to be individual while also being loyal to the community. These talks will offer insight into how and why Irish novelists have created a globally recognised literature with a reach and resonance far beyond the shores of Ireland itself.